What Was I Thinking???!!!

I thought I would share a personal story from the 1980's. That's me and my girlfriend, Shannon, from prom in the picture above. My hair is very 80's but that's not the story......its even worse.

My senior year was ……interesting. That was the year I dated Shannon (name NOT changed to protect the innocent….since she wasn’t). It all started out as you’d expect, nice guy asks out girl way out of his league and she says yes, guy floats around on a cloud for 4 months then all hell breaks loose and he wonders who he’s dating. I’ll quickly skip past the first 4 months (which is how it felt at the time) and get right to the day I should have seen as the blinding spotlight of Yikes.

I started my senior year as a very skinny, slightly geeky 16 year old (I turned 17 two months into the school year) and I had a car (an early birthday/graduation/Christmas gift that summer). Shannon was a junior and not yet 16 (important info for later). We would meet each day at lunch and talk about what we wanted to do after school (information pertaining to said activities and discussions has been omitted for purposes of maintaining a Family-friendly rating). Shannon didn’t have a 6th period class as she had already been kicked out of it (for ditching) and would have to wait around an hour after her final class for me to get out before we could leave each day.

Well on this one particular day, she asked me if I could give her my car keys so she could wait in my car instead of having to walk around the whole hour. (play ominous, foreboding music here). And since I’m an idiot and can’t see how that might go bad I said “sure” and handed over my car keys. The end of the school day comes and I head out to the parking lot and “Hey….my car’s not here! Hmmmm, that’s odd. Shannon doesn’t have a license yet and my car is a stick shift. She can’t possibly know how to drive a stick yet. I think I’ll wait a few minutes and HOPE she shows up soon with my car." (play Jeopardy music here) A half an hour goes by and the parking lot is now empty except for me. So I head over to the pay phone (back when they still existed) and I call her house….and her Mom answers the phone!!! “Hi, umm …its…ahhh…. Steven…..is…is Shannon there?” NO, SHE ISN’T!!!! WHERE ARE YOU???? “I’m…uhhh…I’m still at school” DON’T MOVE, WE’LL BE RIGHT THERE!!!!! The next 15 minutes I thought were the longest of my entire life….until they arrived (in my car) and drove me the next 15 minutes back to their house. I spent the whole drive in the backseat of my own car being yelled at by my girlfriend’s parents the whole way. It seems that in the intervening time since giving Shannon my keys, several things happened and most of them were not good.

Shannon decided to skip the rest of her classes after lunch and head home. Another girl was her accomplice in this and since they now had access to a car, they were off. When they arrived at Shannon’s house they quickly discovered that her Mom was home for the day, so they jumped back into the car and decided to head to the beach. Along the way, the two unlicensed 15 year olds ran a stop sign……in front of a Police officer!! The flashing lights go on, the girls stop…Oh wait…No, they didn’t!!! They floor it and try to run. About 3 blocks into the chase, one of them gets the bright idea to pull into a driveway and hope that will confuse the cop who's only 30 feet behind them. Turns out the drive way they pulled into had a car already parked in it. To this day I’m amazed that the front bumper on a 1975 Ford Mustang II can do that much damage to another car and not sustain a single mark on it. The 1958 Chevy Bel Air parked in the driveway was knocked completely off the jack stands it was on and the front end was about 12 inches shorter than normal. Again, my crappy Mustang II sustained not even a scratch. There wasn’t even paint transfer.

Well you can imagine the next hour or so as the police called her Mom and they take reports and paperwork is filled out and names and numbers are exchanged. Shannon’s parents managed to talk the police into releasing the car to them and they took her home, where she promptly ran away. So, I’m now sitting in her parent’s kitchen being read the riot act and threatened that if I don’t go find her and return her, they will file a police report stating that I’m corrupting their daughter. I try to explain what happened and how I had no part in any of what occurred but they’re mad and not throwing things at me so I agree to be an unpaid amateur bounty hunter.

I head back home in my impervious, classic-car-destroying Ford heap and there she sits, on my front porch, looking pitiful. We talk about what happened for an hour and I convince her to go home (mostly so I don’t get in any trouble). When we arrive at her house, her parents tell me that she’s now grounded for the next month and I should just forget about seeing her anymore (like that ever stopped teenagers). The next few weeks were filled with calls from insurance companies and threats of lawsuits and my Mom had to threaten to have the car declared as stolen…Twice!! Once by Shannon and once by her parents. Eventually we get the whole matter resolved with the damage being paid by her parents.

The final chapter on this story is that in the month that she was grounded and I wasn’t allowed to see her, she snuck out several times and went to dance clubs in Hollywood where she met some college guy and cheated on me with him. Her parents caught her with him and they were doing drugs together. I only know this because her Mom actually called me and apologized because the whole time we were going out, they were convinced I was giving her drugs. During the argument with her parents, Shannon actually said to them that I was too nice of a guy to do drugs. To this day I’ve never done ANY drugs, not once (play some Adam Ant - Goody Two Shoes here).

The part that still bugs me is that she never gave me back any of the records I let her borrow. Wham’s first album. The Pet Shop Boys, Please. Real Life. Camouflage. I’ve replaced all of them over the years on cd but those were all original vinyl copies. If I could have a spot in a time machine, I would get those records back. I wouldn’t change going out with her. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able to tell that story forever. But What was I thinking?